Ion Storm Austin Games Released as of April 3, 2004:Deus ExDeus Ex: Invisible War

Let's Deux Ex was real good game and won several awards, but suffered from sales because the game was too intimidating to some people.

Deus Ex:IW has a good premise and game design, but the story wasn't deep enough for some fans. Warren Spector mentioned this at the GDC last month and mentioned the next DX game will be more involving than DX:IW. DX:IW faults were the development of 2 identical version for PC/Xbox. Here's what should've happened:

DX:IW Release Xbox Version is late 2003, PC Version pushed backed to Early 2004.

PC Version should've been pushed back to early 2004 simply because some crucial memory leaks were present and interface needed a slight a change of heart. I'm however impressed that Ion Storm managed to develop 2 versions simultaneously and still cranked out somewhat of a good game. Next time they'll have to things differently when doing simultaneous development projects.

Everyone has been saying Thief 3 will suck because of this same stage is happening with it. Here's a point I want to make regarding Thief 3 being developed cross platform.Thief 3 isn't as complex as DX:IW was so Ion Storm can focus more on stealth and none of these excessive combat features and thus Ion Storm doesn't have to code interactive conversations like in DX:IW. The Conversation alone in DX:IW were thousands of pages code and that takes a good chunk of time to get working correctly. Thief 3 will not suffer because the Dev team isn't as constrained to get different systems or optimizations put into Unreal Engine to enhance the Thief 3 itself. Ion Storm is able to create a better game and increase visuals from a graphics standpoint more than they could've with DX:IW time constraints Ion Faced.

Making an early judegemnt on a game is not good. You don't know how the game plays or feels so I suggest wait for a demo(if any) and then piss and moan after you get a taste of Thief 3 and go from there.

You people always have a tendency to blame the developer for every little things that goes wrong when a game is released.

Halo for PC is taxing a lot of high end machines right now because it uses DirectX 9.0b technology and is the first game to use ps2.0 technology as well. We had similar situation with "Aquanox" because it used ps1.1 technology and was the first game out then that used it and needed a Geforce 3 to run smoothly. It's going to take a couple of Video Driver releases to get the optimizations and speed up a bit for all High End Cards. NVIDIA/ATI will need to optimize the driver code a little bit which is expected. PS 2.0 has never been fully tested with a game until now and we are noticing the differences already. The Blame doesn't fall on Gearbox/Bungie or MS. They crushed the Major bugs and minor bugs needed to get the game shipped out to stores. All developers care about is crushing the last minute showstopper bug that tends crop up after release and gearbox did a fantastic job of making sure there were none found after proper internal testing. Now Gearbox's job as well as Bungie and MS is to continue the support of Halo and release updates on an as needed basis and get the mod tools out for the community.

Automatically relating to Gearbox's bad experience with 007:Nightfire is low blow and gearbox has released real good games in the past but there will always be a game that won't work out and companies take chances to push it out the door. Yes I agree Nightfire had issue but it was probably rushed for release in time for the Die Another Day theatrical release last fall. So who knows if that was the situation or not, but I can tell Gearbox has put that experience aside and moving on. Halo isn't Buggy. It's using new technology and is the first game to introduce it and they'll be more to come this fall you watch.